Nice Work If You Can Get It
by Kay Taylor
Summary: Hermione takes a summer job for her Muggle Studies class.


The decision to get a summer job was prompted by a sunny day in her Muggle Studies class, when the sun was streaming through the windows of the classroom (third floor, Transfigurations corridor, North Wing on Saturdays) and Professor Veight was taking about Muggle offices. Though Hermione knows about the dental surgery, with its starched white coats and its strange, lingering smell of lemon disinfectant - which clung to her for days after the Friday when she'd been sick at school, and had to sit on the uncomfortable chair in the waiting room for what seemed like hours until her Mum could come out in her unfamiliar whites-and-gloves - the diagram in the textbook is something she's only seen in the rare times she's watched TV in the holidays.   
  
It's a strange, uncomfortable thing that Hermione sometimes feels her knowledge of the Muggle world is disappearing. Unlike Harry - who was never a part of that world, not _really_ - it's where her home is, where her heart is meant to be, and it makes her frown and chew her lip when she has to take a second thought before explaining to Ron how to use a telephone properly, or when she catches herself using phrases in Muggle Studies like Muggles have adapted to the absence of magic'. Because, of course, they haven't - they've invented and innovated, and come up with some pretty horrendous ideas in their time, but on the whole you can't forget that Muggles aren't _just_ the absence of magic. Hermione worries that sometimes she thinks more like a witch at home than she should, always chafing at the need to turn the lights out at the light-switch, always silently comparing cars and trains to Floo powder.   
  
Half-and-half; Mudblood; Muggle-born. Charms on one hand and dentistry and zebra crossings on the other. Hermione doesn't really need the money, because her parents have always been generous with the pocket-money for their only daughter, as long as there's a solemn promise that it won't be spent on penny sweets. But she thinks it'd be interesting research for the NEWT in Muggle Studies she's already made up her mind to take, and what with the subscription to the Daily Prophet and the handfuls of books she seems to manage to pick up every time she goes browsing in Hogsmeade, she realises that the extra money might come in handy.   
  
Ron thinks she's mad, which surprises her a little. She'd always sort of assumed that Ron, with his hand-me-down robes and patched-up broomstick, would have a whole clutch of summer jobs, but it turned out that he'd had a paper round for the village shop in Ottery-St-Catchpole, and they'd sacked him after the _Witch Weekly_ seemed to turn into a gooey, green mass (and the _Daily Prophet_ into a small boiled sweet) whenever Ron shrunk the papers for easier carrying. The villagers complained; Mrs Smythe threatended to hex his ears purple if she ever caught him, and Ron was sacked within a few days of starting his first and last summer job.  
  
It saddens her a little that Ron is sure that a gleaming career in professional Quidditch awaits him - so sure that he spends his holidays practising in the paddock, reading _Martin Miggs_ and playing tricks on Ginny - because she could see, even at the last, triumphant match of the season, that her Ron needed to be better than he was.   
  
What do you want to be working in an office for, anyway? he asked her on the last Hogsmeade weekend of term, as they sat on the fence outside the Three Broomsticks and ate Every-Flavour Beans (Hermione quietly resolving that this was the last handful of sweets before the holiday, envisaging cries of horror from her parents). It'll be hot, noisy, and you'll turn into Percy within weeks.  
  
Hermione privately thinks that really, there's nothing that Ron would understand about extra-curricular studies, even if an angry examiner chased him around his dreams every night, as had been the case for a few eventful days before her OWLS.  
  
The first day in the Muggle world after Hogwarts is always a shock, like a bucket of cold water, though the cold water is actually satellite dishes and Marmite and laptop computers and mobile phones and traffic lights. Sometimes she wonders if this is what it would feel like if a Muggle from years ago - someone from Charles Dickens' books, she did them years ago in her primary school - got hold of a Time-Turner and ended up blinking on the pavement, looking at the lights and the people. It embarrasses her a little. Her parents ask her if she's all right, and she squints up at them in the sunlight, and nods, her fingers tightening around the Prefect badge that's hidden in her fist. The Wizarding World is at war, she thinks, for the second time in twenty years, and here they're worried about hosepipe bans and the situation in the Middle East, when the Dementors could march on London and make the whole thing irrelevant.  
  
It makes her dizzy. And the air-conditioning in the office she's working in makes her vaguely nauseous, pumping around another unfamiliar smell. She can't place it, but something in her mind wants to put it in the same category as Work: dentist's surgery' and she recognises it's a smell she hasn't yet got a mental place for. The low humming of the fluorescent lighting drives her mad before she works out what it is. And the other workers don't look up as she comes in, because they're too intent on keeping up words per minute, or whatever the hell they have to do to keep their jobs, keep the money coming in. It's all so alien, but Hermione takes a deep breath (and what _is_ that smell, vaguely like pine needles?) and reminds herself that she once stepped off the Hogwarts Express and got into a tiny boat to take a journey over dark water to an enchanted castle.   
  
She imagines having to sit in this cubicle and type for hours and hours and hours, every day, to get enough money to eat, or keep hold of somewhere warm to sleep, and suddenly it doesn't seem too bad. After all, this is just another piece of coursework for her; something she wants to do to prove to herself that, yes, she is a Muggle-born and a witch, and at home in both worlds. If she could see it dispassionately, a field study, then maybe she wouldn't notice that the woman in the cubicle next to her has her shoulders bowed over and down, as if crushed by an invisible weight, and the air smells of _people_, people at the daily grind, people working to make ends meet, and Hermione realises that she's never even considered what it would be like to need the money.  
  
She thinks that Mr Weasley would froth at the mouth to see her now; tiny cubicle, computer (keyboard slightly discoloured from the imprint of millions of successive keystrokes), internal phone which she's been forbidden to touch, half-broken desk lamp, stapler, inbox, outbox. And she settles into the chair, a little too high but she can't work out, even after a good ten minutes of pushing and shoving and thinking longingly of magic, as she knows _just_ the charm for the job, how to adjust it. Her feet can barely touch the floor in her scuffed black shoes, and she rests her wrists on the desktop and thinks about what her Dad was telling her about RSI and eye fatigue and all those other workaday problems of the Muggle office.   
  
She sighs, and straightens up, and turns over the first sheet of paper, seeing rows and rows of numbers cascading down the page - blood type and blood pressure, height and weight and body mass, pulse rate and pupil dilation.   
  
And in the block of cubicles by the window, she sees Percy Weasley, traitor. His red hair is messier than she's ever seen it before, and his reading glasses are slightly askew, long fingers on the keyboard, back and shoulders held stiffly, as though he's not used to this sort of thing, and she can see him reaching up to the delete' key more often than he uses the space bar.  
  
And he's typing as if his next meal depended on it.


End file.
